They heard footsteps behind them. It was the expert.
“I went looking for you at the hotel,” he said.
“Why, is something the matter?”
“No, but tomorrow we have to go through some reports with the representatives of the local government association.”
The priest was observing the expert closely, trying to decide whether or not he had overheard the end of their exchange. “We were talking about your national customs,” he said. “They are so interesting.” The expert smiled to himself.
“He was telling me about the vendetta,” the general added. “It seems to be of great psychological interest.”
“Nonsense, it is of no psychological interest at all,” the expert contradicted. “I know there are some foreigners who have the idea that our vendetta and various other pernicious customs are to be explained by the so-called Albanian psychology, but the whole notion is too absurd.”
“Ah!” the priest said.
“Yes. There are certain foreigners who come here and study our vendetta with what appears to be enormous enthusiasm; but they do so with a predetermined intention.”
“They study it because the question is one of scientific interest, surely,” the priest put in. “I disagree. Their real aim is to spread the notion that the Albanian people is doomed to annihilation, to make people familiar with it and accept it.”
“Oh, I hardly think so, I hardly think so,” the priest said with a forced smile.
The expert walked a few more steps with them, but then took his leave of them.
“Just listen to that!” the priest remarked. The general resumed their discussion.
“You explain the matter of their customs solely on psychological grounds,” he said, “but I think that one cannot altogether exclude certain other motives from any such explanation, objective motives of an historical and military order for example. Do you know what the Albanian people remind me of? They remind me of the sort of wild beast that at the approach of any danger, before leaping or charging, freezes into immobility in a state of extreme tension, muscles coiled, every sense on the alert. This country, I feel, has been exposed to so many perils for so long that a state of alert like that has become second nature to it.”
“Yes, that is precisely what they mean by their much vaunted vigilance,” the priest said.
He continued with the subject, but the general was no longer listening to him. After a while he broke in:
“Have you noticed how much we talk about them? After all, what do we really care about their affairs? All we ask is that they should exterminate themselves. And the quicker the better.”
The priest gestured his agreement with spread fingers and a shrug.
“We would do better to put our minds to our labours,” the general went on, “our wretched labours that have exhausted us and that we cannot seem to bring to any successful conclusion. There is even a sort of evil spell, something sinister anyway, dogging this work of ours.”
“I cannot agree,” the priest rejoined. “I am aware of nothing of the sort. Our mission is a sublime one.”
“I have the feeling that we wander across this country like an ambulatory tumour. We just get under the feet of all the inhabitants and hinder them in their work.”
“You are referring, I take it, to the incident when the work on the aqueduct was delayed a few days on our account?”
“No,” the general said. “I am not thinking only of that. There is something queer and maleficent in our work altogether.”
“There is nothing of the kind,” the priest said.
“Has it ever occurred to you that the unhappy creatures we are hunting out so zealously might prefer to be left in peace where theyare?”
“That is absurd,” the priest said. “Our mission is a noble and humane one. Anyone would be proud to be entrusted with it.”
The general thought that the other was going to bring up the purification of the spirit, the light of the afterlife that enlightens the kingdom of the departed. But his interlocutor’s expression was rather sombre.
“And yet there’s something not quite right about it, a certain irony, however slight.”
“I do not accept that,” the priest said. “There is no such element in our mission. But perhaps there are other motives that affect your emotion, motives concerned with your profession as a soldier.”
“What motives of that sort could I have?”
“Perhaps it would be better not to talk about them. It may be that you do not even wish to admit them to yourself.”
The general produced a forced smile.
“More psychology?” he said. “Apparently you are a devotee of psychoanalysis. It is something I have heard a great deal of talk about but that I don’t, to be honest, really understand. We soldiers do not go in much for that brand of hair-splitting.”
“Yes, I realize that,” the priest said, obviously meaning “everyone to his taste”.
“But leaving that aside, what is this explanation of yours of my uneasiness about this mission of ours? I should like to hear your arguments; it’s always a pleasure to hear you talk. And I promise you not to take umbrage at whatever you say.”
“Very well, since you insist, I will give you my opinion,” the priest said with the greatest possible calm. “The reason you are suffering from this sense of oppression is that in the depths of your soul you regret not having led our divisions in Albania yourself. And you tell yourself that under your leadership everything might perhaps have gone differently, that instead of leading our troops to defeat and destruction you would have ensured that they emerged with honour from that great test. That is why you are constantly spreading out those maps of yours, hunching over them for hours on end, scribbling battle plans on your cigarette packets. You lament over every failure, you relive every setback as though they were realities, and you see yourself retrospectively in the place of those ill-starred officers who commanded our troops then; and you have begun to entertain an utterly irrational dream: that of transforming our defeats into victories …”
“That is enough,” the general said. “Am I a psychopath that you should start burrowing into the secrets of my soul like this?”
The priest simply smiled.
The general’s face had clouded over.
“No,” he said slowly, “there is no secret reason. I am not an ignorant young girl, after all, imagining that a search for the bones of soldiers fallen in battle could even remotely resemble a sentimental journey. I had always assumed that the task ahead was an arduous and sinister one.”
He spoke truly. He had a sense from the start that this task awaiting him was quite unusual. He knew, as the Minister said, that he would be helped by love and hate. As he was returning home from the War Office, that day when he was first entrusted with this mission, he felt music echoing in his heart. Solemn, funeral music. And then, when he began opening the files and looking through them, and he felt that those interminable lists were breathing out great gusts of vengeance, he had gone to the globe and looked for Albania. And when he had his finger on it he felt a sadistic satisfaction at seeing just how small it was - no bigger than a dot. But then he had felt the hatred flood through him again. This pinprick on the map had filled the mouths of his country’s brave, beautiful children with dust. He felt he wanted to get to this savage, backward country (as the geography text books all called it) as soon as he possibly could. He wanted to walk proudly among these people that he envisaged as a wild barbarian tribe, looking down at them with hatred and contempt as if to say: “Savages, look what you’ve done!” He pictured to himself the solemn ceremonial as the remains were borne away, the troubled and bewildered look in the Albanians’ eyes - the guilty look of the lumbering lout who has smashed a priceless vase and stands there feeling dumbly sorry, looking askance at the fragments. “And yet,” the general resumed wearily as he pursued his thought, “I felt proud. We would bear our soldiers’ coffins proudly through their midst, demonstrating t
o them that even our deaths are nobler than their lives. But when we got here it all turned out differently. I don’t need to tell you that. Our pride was the first thing to go; then before long it was clear there was nothing solemn left in the whole business, my last illusions gradually faded, and now we have to keep on and on amid general indifference, observed by mocking, enigmatic eyes, pitiful clowns of war, more to be pitied in the event than those who once fought and were defeated in this country.”
The priest made no answer, and the general was sorry he had spoken.
They walked on a short way in silence. The last leaves continued to fall onto the pavement. They passed other pedestrians. The general was aware of distress and loneliness inside him. He found it distasteful talking about such subjects. Better to walk on and recall those dark days they had spent on the road and in their tent, when the rain soaked them daily and they shivered in the wind, those enigmatic looks cast at them by the sombrely clad peasants in their coarse woollen clothes, that night when the priest - trapped in God knows what nightmare - shrieked with terror in the dark; the battlefield now drowned beneath the artificial lake of a hydroelectric dam; the graveyards lying beneath the deep waters, and the red, bright red reflections from their surface as the sun sank; and that skull too, its golden teeth all gleaming in the sun as the workmen unearthed it, seeming to cast a sarcastic smile at everything around it.
On both sides of the path the ditches were full of dead leaves, and the statues in the great park seemed to be shivering beneath the stripped trees.
Having reached the summit they were able to look down the far slope to the artificial lake lying at its foot, surrounded by small hills and insinuating its variously shaped inlets among them.
On the curving brow of the hill itself there stood a church, and beside it an open-air café. All around the café’s dance-floor, tall cypresses quivered in the keen wind. In one corner, apparently abandoned, stood a big pile of crates with the words Birra Korça printed on them in black.
They turned their backs on the lake and gazed out across the city. The general’s raincoat flapped loudly in the wind.
Their eyes came naturally to rest on the line of the main boulevard that bisected the city. A poplar swaying in the wind would conceal now the Presidency building from their view, now that of the Central Committee. When there was a particularly strong gust, a branch would move across in front of the tall clock tower apparently stuck to the minaret of the mosque, then conceal a portion of Skanderburg Square, stretch across the facade of the Executive Committee building, and just manage to brush the State Bank.
“In my book on Albania it said that the buildings along the last section of the main boulevard, when viewed as a whole, form what looks like a giant Fascist axe,” the general said, extending his arm in the direction of the buildings in question.
“Look more closely,” the priest said, stretching out an arm in his turn. “The boulevard is the handle of the axe, that big building there, the Rectorate, is the head of the handle protruding beyond the blade itself, the opera house is the back of the axe, and the stadium” - and here the priest made a sweep of the hand to the right - “represents the curved cutting edge.”
“In a word, one could make a sort of gigantic brand burned into the very heart of their capital.”
“It was after the war, when they flew over the city for the first time, that the Communists noticed the effect. And they immediately gave orders that the image of the axe must be removed in some way.”
They continued along the wide asphalt path beside the church. A young man and a girl were sitting side by side on one of the benches spaced along it. The girl, a dreamy look in her eyes, had lain her head on her companion’s shoulder while he gently stroked her knees.
“Shall we go down again,” the general said. “The wind is cold up here.”
15
HAVING LEFT THE ROAD and advanced for a while through fields the two vehicles were now skirting vineyards.
The general, map spread on his knees, glanced out occasionally through the window, knowing that at the same moment, in the cabin of the lorry behind with his copy of the self-same map also spread on his knees, the expert was probably glancing out of his window in exactly the same way, thus ensuring that there was no chance of their missing the precise spot at which they were supposed to stop.
On the right there is a line of tall poplars. Looking towards them you see the farm buildings beyond, and then further on still, a mill. The place is at the foot of the trees. So as to be able to locate the graves again more easily later we dug them in a V formation, the point towards the sea. Five on one side, five on the other, then the lieutenant at their head.
“Tell him to drive towards the poplars,” the general said. The priest translated the order to the driver. As they stepped out of the car the tops of the tall trees were quivering in the wind. The priest set off towards the site of the graves slightly ahead of the rest of the group, and uttered a cry of surprise.
“What is it?” the general asked as he caught up with him.
“Look,” the priest said, “look over there.”
The general turned his eyes in the direction indicated.
“What does it mean?” he said angrily.
At the foot of the poplars were two rows of opened graves forming a V. The trenches had presumably been dug some ten or fifteen days before, since the recent rains had half filled them with water.
“I just can’t understand it,” the priest said.
“Someone has come and opened these graves before us,” the general said. His voice quivered as he spoke.
“Here is the expert,” the priest said. “We shall see what he has to say.”
“What is it?” the expert asked in his turn as he approached.
Without a word the general gestured with one hand towards the trenches. The expert looked at them for a moment then shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s strange!” he said in a low voice.
“These graves have been opened without our authorization, without our knowledge,” the priest said. “What have you to say?”
Once more the expert shrugged.
“When will these provocations end I should like to know?” the general cried. “I shall take the matter to the highest authority immediately.”
“At the moment I can give you no explanation,” the expert said, “but I hope to be able to clear the matter up without delay. If you will only have a little patience.”
“Of course, of course,” the general said, fuming with fury.
The workmen and the two drivers had by now caught up and were also staring stupefied at the graves.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to us before,” the oldest one said.
The expert counted the graves for the second time as he rolled up his map.
“Listen,” he said turning to the lorry driver. “Drive over to that farm and bring someone back with you. Anyone you can find.
Tell them we’re from the government and that it’s an urgent matter.” Turning back to his interlocutors, he added, “I can’t offer you any explanation for the moment. I can only assure you that if someone did in fact commit such an action as a deliberate and calculated outrage, then he will be punished in accordance with our own laws.”
“Whatever the intention,” the priest said, “it is still a serious profanation.”
Meanwhile, standing looking down at the graves the workmen were expressing astonishment at their odd arrangement.
“It’s the first time we’ve come across a cemetery like this. In aV.”
“It’s strange!”
“That’s how the storks fly,” the old workman said. “Haven’t you ever seen them in the autumn?”
The sound of the returning lorry’s engine could be heard in the distance. There was someone sitting up in the cab beside the driver.
“I hope that everything will be cleared up now,” the expert said.
The driver got down then went round a
nd opened the other door for the newcomer. The latter, having clambered down, stared at them all attentively one by one.
“Do you work on this farm?” the expert asked him.
“Yes.”
“Do you know anything about these military graves?”
The man glanced over at the trenches.
“Only what everyone else round here knows,” he said. “Which is?”
“Well, they’re the graves of foreign soldiers, aren’t they? And they’ve been there over twenty years now.”
“Then how do you explain …”
“And ten days ago they were opened up again.”
“Ah, now that’s just what we want to know about,” the expert said. “Who was it who opened them up again ten days ago?”
The man stared round once more at the workmen, the general, the priest, then the two vehicles.
“Did you see them with your own eyes, the people who opened these graves?” the expert tried again.
The man seemed reluctant to reply. Then he suddenly burst out:
“Are you trying to make a fool of me?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You know the answer as well as I do.”
The expert was visibly taken aback. They all stood around in silence, obviouslydazed.
“Please. Can you tell us quite simply who opened these graves ten days ago?”
The man from the farm glared at the expert angrily.
“You opened them, you know that,” he said curtly “All of you,” the man went on, and his pointing finger swung round to include the workmen, the general, the priest, and the two drivers.
They all stared at one another in bewilderment.
“Where did you manage to find this one?” someone muttered to the lorry driver.
“Listen,” the expert said to the man, “it is really not in very good taste for you to…”
The General of the Dead Army Page 13